New Fanken-food is creepier than ever

Shouldn't consumers have a right to know more about nano-foods before they're just rolled out without clear identification? Maybe it's safe, maybe it's not, but it just seems even creepier than cloned meat to me. Consumers overwhelmingly reject cloned meat when asked and I suspect if they were properly educated on nano-food, they would feel the same. I'm not sure comparing nano-food to asbestos (as there is at the end of the article) is what I want to hear for products already in the market.

Consumer advocates taking part in a food safety conference in Orlando, Florida, this week said food produced by using nanotechnology is quietly coming onto the market, and they want U.S. authorities to force manufacturers to identify them.

Nanotechnology involves the design and manipulation of materials on molecular scales, smaller than the width of a human hair and invisible to the naked eye. Companies using nanotechnology say it can enhance the flavor or nutritional effectiveness of food.

U.S. health officials generally prefer not to place warning labels on products unless there are clear reasons for caution or concern. But consumer advocates say uncertainty over health consequences alone is sufficient cause to justify identifying nano-foods.

Prefer not to place warning labels unless there are clear reasons for caution? If there's been a hearty debate on the issue in public circles, maybe, but this has been a pretty quiet rollout, so maybe there ought to be labels and let consumers decide. Read More......

GOP Senators filibuster Defense bill for their oil company benefactors

Wow.

Just when you think the GOP Senate obstructionists can't sink any lower, they do. Brandon Friedman at VetVoice posed the question: "Will Senate Republicans Vote Against the Troops?"

We have our answer. Yes, the Senate Republicans did vote against the troops.

Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans have basically been filibustering every bill til the oil companies get what they want. But, surely, they wouldn't put the oil companies over America's defense needs when we're in the middle of two wars??? Wrong. They did. Seriously, they they filibustered a bill, S. 3001, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2009, which, among other things, provided pay raises for troops, health care and protection from IEDs. The bill needed 60 votes. Thirty-eight Republicans voted NO against moving forward. Harry Reid (who voted no for procedural reasons) had this to say (via email):

"As has been their hallmark this Congress, Bush-McCain Republicans have once again run away from an important debate, failing to back up their words with action. Despite their strong rhetoric on supporting our troops, they have refused to give them a well-deserved pay raise, denied our troops mine-resistant vehicles to keep them safe and said no to ensuring our servicemen and -women get the health care they need.

"It is this kind of misplaced priorities that is making America less secure. Our military readiness is down, Afghanistan is slipping further into violence, Pakistan remains in crisis, and Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are still on the loose nearly seven years after 9/11. The Iraq war is not only costly, but President Bush and John McCain have provided no plan for responsibly ending the war and returning to the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Republicans are despicable. But, it pays. Siding with the oil companies worked financially for John McCain:

Campaign contributions from oil industry executives to Sen. John McCain rose dramatically in the last half of June, after the senator from Arizona made a high-profile split with environmentalists and reversed his opposition to the federal ban on offshore drilling.

Oil and gas industry executives and employees donated $1.1 million to McCain last month -- three-quarters of which came after his June 16 speech calling for an end to the ban -- compared with $116,000 in March, $283,000 in April and $208,000 in May.

Now, the GOPers are putting their oil interests over America's soldiers. Sick. Read More......

Shell profits up 33% to $11.55 billion for quarter

Awwwweeeee. Isn't that cute? I'll bet the Shell lobbyists are buying McCain lots of donuts with sprinkles now. They've been so supportive of him since he flip-flopped on offshore drilling, with contributions arriving immediately. Big Oil really does have our best interest in mind, so why can't we just accept that and give them even more free handouts and tax breaks?

Anglo-Dutch energy giant Royal Dutch Shell said Thursday its net profits jumped by a third to 11.556 billion dollars (7.409 billion euros) in the second quarter owing to record high oil prices.

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Delta Air does it again - mileage fliers to get shafted

This is a company that would much rather prefer not having customers and quite frankly, they should just go for it. The management team is doing its best to alienate customers and we're all familiar with their surly service both on the ground and in the sky. Their latest move is targeting frequent fliers, as in the people who keep the airline in business. Delta wants to make trading in air miles even more difficult, if not impossible.

If Delta is committed to kicking their customers, fine, but don't complain and ask for another $15 billion handout. Try working for business like everyone else, which means offering customer service. The only other industry that I've ever seen treat people so poorly is cable TV (I'm lookin' at you Comcast) and I quit giving them my business years ago. Delta needs to throw in the towel and give it up. Just like PanAm, Eastern and the others, they won't be missed. We'll all survive. Read More......

Newspaper political bloggers all picked wrong presidential candidates last November

At the time, Joe said it would be Obama. More from E&P;. Read More......

Obama asks McCain: Is that the best you can come up with? Is that really what this election is about?

Answer those questions, John "Paris/Britney" McCain:



Team Obama should turn this into an ad. Be much better than that usual pablum being produced by GMMB. The campaign's ads, including that new one, "Low Road," look like every other political ad run by every other candidate - including first time congressional candidates. Given that's all the D.C. media consultants know how to do, it's not surprising. But, this campaign can't be like every other political campaign. The ads need to reflect Obama. Shouldn't be that hard. He gives plenty of great material -- like the speech in the video above. Read More......

McCain "proud" to make the election about Britney Spears

Hey, be happy he didn't invoke Mary Pickford.

McCain today said that he's proud that he thinks the role of commander in chief of our country during war time has something to do with Britney Spears (and it's very doubtful that McCain even knows who she is). It's sad what McCain has become in desperation. And note how the article mentions that McCain hasn't taken questions from his traveling press in a week. Is something wrong? In so many ways, he's not the same man he was 8 eight years ago. Read More......

TIME's Klein: Mccain isn't showing courage

TIME's Joel Klein:

Courage is grace under pressure. McCain showed it when he was a prisoner of war, and on many issues--yes, even on his stubborn insistence that the surge would work--but he is not showing it now. He is showing flop sweat. It is not a quality usually associated with successful leadership.

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FOX employee covering McCain: "It's unbelievable" how little campaigning McCain does

Sounds like someone is getting tired. A Wall Street Journal reporter backs him up. It's a longer article in Rolling Stone, and isn't online. This is just a snippet - you can find the entire article at the news stand. The rest of the article reveals that McCain is no longer talking to the press at all on his bus.


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Why is MSNBC censoring Rachel Maddow?

UPDATE: Here is the video that MSNBC is trying to censor, courtesy of my friend John in Vermont:



Because she smacked down Pat Buchanan. Read what happened. Then read what some folks are doing about it. Read More......

CNN's Cafferty: McCain is jealous that everybody likes Obama

CNN's Jack Cafferty gives John McCain some straight talk (you can watch the video half-way down the page via the link):

CAFFERTY: I'd be willing to make you a bet. If you added up all of the people who have attended every political event John McCain has held since the campaign started, the number would not get to 200,000, which is the number of people that watched Barack Obama speak in Berlin.

That ad that he put out is nothing more than the same jealousy he displayed last week when Obama was on this tour.

McCain went to Canada, Mexico and Colombia. And the only thing I remember about any of those three trips or visits was some hostages got released one day while he was in Colombia. It had nothing to do with McCain being there.

So, you know, Obama is getting a lot of attention and McCain doesn't like it. It's jealousy

But at the beginning of the campaign he said -- this is the guy who rides around on something called the Straight Talk Express -- this will not be that kind of a campaign. We're going to keep it on the high road. We're going to talk about the issues. And he's come out with one snarky, low rent piece of television after another.

Now, that being said, McCain's running on short money.

So how do you compensate?

You put out these goofy commercials with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in them and then people like us run them over and over and over again for free.

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Senate GOP Set To Block Troop Funding Bill

Bring it on.

Republicans in the Senate may be walking into a political trap this week, in which their insistence on considering energy legislation leads them to block significant increases in funding for the troops in Iraq.

Going into this week, the Senate Republicans insisted that they would block all the legislative measures until an energy bill was first brought to the floor.

Democratic leadership, initially furious over the obstructionism, is now calling their bluff. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last night introduced a Department of Defense Authorization bill that would, among other things, include a 3.9 percent across-the-board pay raise for military personnel; major funding increases for research into traumatic brain injury treatment and troop suicide prevention efforts; $26 billion for the Defense Health Program, and $500 million for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles. A vote could come as early as tonight.

I sure hope John McCain will be kicking and screaming at the Republicans to support this troop funding bill because, as you'll recall, McCain said that nothing could keep him away from supporting our troops. It looks like in the next 24 hours, we'll get our chance to find out. Read More......

Billion dollar bankruptcies increasing, more expected in 2008

Whatever you do, please don't even consider questioning the economic policies of the Republican party because they are the masters of the universe. As long you ignore the facts on the ground you will be fine.

Fremont General Corp, which was one of the largest U.S. providers of subprime mortgages before regulators ordered it to stop making the loans, was the largest filing of the year with $13 billion in pre-petition assets, BankruptcyData.com said. Fremont filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in May, after arranging to sell bank branches and deposits to CapitalSource Inc.

SemGroup LP, the energy trader which filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors last week, was the second-largest bankruptcy filing of the year with $6 billion in pre-petition assets.

"We seem to be in the midst of a 'perfect storm' leading to more bankruptcies: high levels of debt, high energy and raw materials costs and weakness in the U.S. economy," George Putnam, III of New Generation Research, which publishes BankruptcyData.com said in a statement.

He forecast bankruptcies could peak as early as the middle of 2009 or continue rising well into 2010.

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IOC "surprised" that they were caught telling lies about censorship

So much for Olympic values. Did the IOC really think they weren't going to be called out on this one? Blaming the local committees is beyond pathetic.

Rights watchdog Amnesty International, whose website is among those barred in China, condemned Internet restrictions during the Games as "compromising fundamental human rights and betraying the Olympic values."

"This blatant media censorship adds one more broken promise that undermines the claim that the Games would help improve human rights in China," Amnesty East Asia researcher Mark Allison said in a statement.

BOCOG spokesman Sun Weide said censorship would not prevent journalists from reporting on the Games, though he acknowledged there would be no access to some websites, such as those of the Falun Gong, which he described as "an evil fake religion that has been banned by the Chinese government."

Nice to see the local team is on board with Olympic values. Let's put aside Falun Gong and talk about Amnesty. What smear do they have for the human rights group? Read More......

John McCain and Britney Spears have something in common

They use the same talking points. Both love George W. Bush:

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Reuters reporter Thomas Ferraro, long mocked as a biased ass...

Reuters reports that Al Gore may be a keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. But of course, God forbid that Reuters actually reported the news. No. This is the first sentence of the Reuter story, announcing that Gore may be keynoting:

Al Gore, long mocked as an exaggerating bore, seems certain to land a lead role at the Democratic National Convention as an internationally recognized defender of the Earth.

Excuse me? Yes, Gore was mocked by Republicans in 2000, who falsely tried to paint him as a liar and a bore. But I didn't realize that Republican slurs against Democratic candidates were now the new required epithet to use any time we refer to those nominees in the future. Does Reuters plan on referring to George Bush as "George Bush, long mocked as a lying idiot" or Ronald Reagan as "long mocked as a bumbling dolt"?

If the entire country, Democrats and Republicans alike, had roundly dismissed Gore as a lying bore, then that lede would be accurate. Basically, someone who is roundly dismissed, and then who rehabilitates themself, you can refer to the rehabilitation. But in this case, this is the Democratic and not the Republican convention. We didn't mock Gore at all, and we certainly didn't call him a liar and a bore. Those were the Republican talking points. Points that Reuters and reporter Thomas Ferraro seem more than happy to parrot. The condascending epithet would only be relevant if the GOP had invited Gore to their convention. It's just incredibly disrespectful, biased, incorrect, irrelevant and journalistically inappropriate, to throw this kind of crap into the first sentence of an article about a former Vice President who is roundly admired in our party.

This is typical of the daily bs we have to deal with in the corporate media. They simply don't know how to do their jobs anymore. Read More......

From the team that brought you two wars, a recession, the housing crisis and so much more, a vicious campaign for a third term

In case you had any doubt, today's NY Times confirms that the Bush/Rove crew has taken over McCain's campaign:

Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.

This is "strikingly reminiscent" of the attacks on Kerry because the same people are doing it. In fairness, this line of attacks just seems more ugly and egregious -- and not too subtly racist (despite Jake Tapper thinking otherwise).

The big questions are: 1) Will the Obama campaign respond more effectively than Kerry did. (They'd better, p.s.) And 2) Will the media actually cover the lies and distortions spewing from McCain's campaign. (The jury is still out on that one. Although some have risen to the task, many seem titillated by the brazenness of the attacks).

The other lingering question is whether the American people will fall for this crap this time. Under the leadership of George Bush and his team (many of whom are now on McCain's campaign), the United States is in the midst of two unfinished wars, stuck in a recession, caught in a housing crisis, experiencing an energy crisis and the environment is in serious danger. The same people who brought us all that are now injecting Britney and Paris into the political debate. Wow. Read More......

McCain is gay-baiting Obama, and it needs to stop

UPDATE: I'm not the only one who thinks McCain is gay-baiting.

I know a thing or two about gay-baiting. I've been working on gay civil rights issue since the early 1990s, when I helped Senator Kennedy's office prepare for the gays in the military hearings, and legislation, in 1993. Since then, I helped Kennedy on the ENDA hearings in the mid 90s, and then moved into my own civil rights advocacy work regardings Matthew Shepard, Timothy McVeigh (the gay one), Dr. Laura, Mary Cheney, Ford, Microsoft and beyond. It's fair to say that I have a pretty good nose for anti-gay bigotry. And McCain is trying to gay-bait Obama.

Of course, McCain isn't stupid. As he's surrounded himself with senior gay male advisors since at least the 1990s, McCain is usually careful about overt gay-bashing (though he did promise the religious right a few weeks ago that he'd be more publicly anti-gay, and just last week said he didn't think gay people should be able to adopt children (he then backtracked, kind of)). Instead, McCain and his people are attempting to define Obama as "gay" by describing him as the stereotypical gay man. Yesterday, a McCain spokesman described Obama as fussy and prone to hysterics. A few days earlier, we were told that Obama was "flitting" around Europe. And before that, a GOP operative called Obama "a fancy lad." Also, who is Obama compared to in the latest McCain ad? (An ad that independent fact-checkers say is totally false.) Two women, and kind of ditzy women at that - Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Let's review. A fussy, fancy lad who flits around Europe, is prone to hysteria, and reminds you of ditzy blonde chicks. Sorry, but that's a stereotypical gay guy. And as I said, McCain knows his gay guys. He's surrounded by them. Read More......

Bush HHS pushing reg that would require hospitals to tolerate bigots on staff

Difficult to explain what they're doing in a nutshell. But basically, you all know that the religious right has been on a crusade of late to ensure that their bigoted and fringe-minded employees can accept health care related jobs and then not administer health care if they religiously object to you. Meaning, if a pharmacist is offended by birth control, they don't need to give you the morning after pill after you've been raped. If an ambulance driver objects to you being gay, they can refuse to help you after a heart attack. And I suppose if an emergency room worker is a Baptist and thinks that Catholics worship Satan (this is what Baptists think, just ask John McCain's ministers), they can presumably walk away as you're being wheeled in on death's door.

This is the kind of thing that Congress needs to stop in its tracks. Your religion doesn't trump my health care. If you have a problem administering health care to someone you don't like, then go work at McDonald's and see if they let you not serve Big Macs to someone you don't like. This is about religious extremists wanting to codify their extremism and bigotry. It's about conservative Christian activists wanting special rights on the job (who among us has the right, expects the right, to not work with a client because of our religion?). The Democrats need to include a provision in an upcoming piece of legislation that would cut off all funds for the implementation of this regulation. Now. Read More......

Thursday Morning Open Thread

Good morning.

We've been saying for weeks that the McCain campaign had nowhere to go but negative. But, even in your wildest imagination could you have envisioned that he'd be using Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? Seriously? It's a fricking presidential election in the middle of a war and a recession -- and that's what the GOP nominee is throwing out? It's an embarrassment to this country.

There's a desperation in the GOP hierarchy. You can see it. Karl Rove is pulling the levers of the McCain campaign these days. He's not trying to elect McCain. He's trying to protect himself, Bush and Cheney from the next administration. McCain is just Rove's latest pawn. In the process, McCain has destroyed what was left of his reputation.

Thread the news, please. Read More......

Full-time to part-time work hits record high

And McCain thinks this is progress? If everyone had friends making million dollar a year lobbyist salaries from Swiss banks, sure, but not so much for everyone else.

The number of Americans who have seen their full-time jobs chopped to part time because of weak business has swelled to more than 3.7 million — the largest figure since the government began tracking such data more than half a century ago.

The loss of pay has become a primary source of pain for millions of American families, reinforcing the downturn gripping the economy. Paychecks are shrinking just as home prices plunge and gas prices soar, furthering the austerity across the nation.

“I either stop eating, or stop using anything I can,” said Marvin L. Zinn, a clerk at a Walgreens drugstore in St. Joseph, Mich., who has seen his take-home pay drop to about $550 every two weeks from about $650, as his weekly hours have dropped to 37.5 from 44 in recent months.

Mr. Zinn has run up nearly $2,000 in credit card debt to buy food. He has put off dental work. He no longer attends church, he said, “because I can’t afford to drive.”

To be fair to John McCain, he's also cutting back. He found a bargain with his $520 Ferragamo "Pregiato Moccasins" and not the $2100 Ferragamo shoes. We all have to be cautious with spending these days, so glad to see him showing restraint as well. What a maverick. Read More......

Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" now 8000 square miles

What does it take to get attention to the problems of farm chemical runoff? The Chesapeake Bay and other bodies of water are also dieing because of these chemicals. I get that they're great for farmers and that the chemical industry makes lots of sales, but what about everyone else? What about those who make a living on the water? What about lost tourist dollars? What about the health hazards related to eating seafood from these areas? In the case of the Chesapeake, when my uncle started chemotherapy a few years ago, his doctors told him to immediately stop eating anything out of the Bay, that cancer rates had skyrocketed in the region and were probably linked to eating the local seafood.

Obviously this issue is going nowhere with the Bush EPA and it's doubtful that McCain would change anything either. Congress is going to have to step up and do something because problems related to farm runoff are getting worse around the country.

The problem of hypoxia -- very low levels of dissolved oxygen -- is a downstream effect of fertilizers used for agriculture in the Mississippi River watershed. Nitrogen is the major culprit, flowing into the Gulf and spurring the growth of algae. Animals called zooplankton eat the algae, excreting pellets that sink to the bottom like tiny stones. This organic matter decays in a process that depletes the water of oxygen.

Researchers expected the dead zone to set a record -- even more than the 8,500 square miles observed in 2002 -- after the Mississippi, swollen with floodwaters, carried an extraordinary amount of nitrates into the Gulf, about 37 percent more than last year and the most since measuring these factors was begun in 1970.

The researchers set out July 20 aboard the Pelican, a 115-foot academic research vessel, and braved 12-foot waves and 35-mph winds from the outer bands of Dolly to take samples. The hypoxia began to appear about halfway to the bottom in waters ranging from 10 to 130 feet deep, said Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, which conducted the study. Some water samples from the bottom of the water column showed no oxygen at all, and instead bore the signature odor of hydrogen sulfide emerging from underlying sediments.

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An oldie but a goodie

To be fair to McCain, it was 24 hours.

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$560 million "wasted" in Iraq

It wouldn't be fair to ask John McCain about yet another story of wasted money in Iraq. It's his pet project but somehow he manages to avoid responsibility for the countless failures. I guess when you're serving him donuts with sprinkles, it's tough to ask the hard questions. Expensive donuts, but who's counting?

The United States has "wasted" more than half a billion dollars in Iraq repairing facilities that were damaged because of poor security, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction says in a report released Wednesday.

Stuart Bowen's quarterly report arrived at a price tag of $560 million by tallying the results of more than 100 audits his office has conducted.

Further billions had to be diverted from reconstruction to security because the Bush administration did not adequately foresee how volatile Iraq would be when it began rebuilding the country, the report says.

"The U.S. government did not fully anticipate or plan for the unstable working environment that faced U.S. managers when reconstruction began in Iraq," it says.

Contractors spent an average of 12.5 percent of their reconstruction contracts on security, the inspector general found.

Bowen's team also criticizes the government for poor coordination between agencies.

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Judge: EPA and Florida turned "blind eye" to Everglades

Since when has the Bush-EPA ever done anything that protects the environment? Democrats consistently fail to highlight the financial damage for the other side of pollution. Business will always say that cutting pollution is expensive and hurts business but there are also health issues for humans as well as lost business for those who promote our environment. There's obviously much to be said about protecting the environment for the sake of the environment but the left has to do a better job of connecting such issues with people.

What also jumps out here is an issue we see across the country and for my home region, the Chesapeake Bay. Farm runoff is creating problems in the Everglades just as it is along the Chesapeake. The corporate farm lobby and the chemical producers have much too much say in issues that impact us all. Obviously it's a lost cause with this administration and in all likelihood it would remain the same under a McCain administration.

The U.S Environmental Protection Agency has turned a "blind eye" to Florida's Everglades cleanup efforts, while the state is violating its own commitment to restore the vast ecosystem, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.

In a stinging ruling from Miami, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold put to rest a 2004 lawsuit filed against the EPA, ordering the agency to review water pollution standards and timelines set by Florida for the Everglades.

Gold repeatedly accused EPA of acting "arbitrarily and capriciously" in its failure to adhere to the mandates of the Clean Water Act.

"Plaintiffs are correct," Gold wrote, "that EPA has once again avoided its duty to protect the Everglades."

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